While the second cohort for The Next 36 was selected back in late November, I recently caught up with Next 36 associates who say that of the original nine, four startups are progressing well. Those include inaugural graduation winner Tradyo, Electric Courage, Winston, and Playfit.

While Techvibes will feature those three startups at a later date, we're going to take a look at how The Next 36 program continues to impact the startup and corporate sectors.

While twelve Next 36 alumni are still working on their N36 ventures in some capacity, three still have the entreprenurial bug and are working on spin-off ventures of their original ideas. Five alumni are working on entirely new for-profit ventures while eight are working on new not-for-profit ventures.

Five others have decided to go work for an entrepreneur that likely needs a young technological mind to shake things up, one is building an invention, three are working in the corporate sector now, and six went back to school full-time.

The program's aim when it began eighteen months ago was to create youth entreprenurialism and it would appear that for the most part the students that took part in this specialized program are still trying to head down that path.

Instead of just nine original ventures, The Next 36 can say that they are now responsible for 19 total ventures created to date.

You could say that 33% of the original ventures have achieved modest success thus far which is a great percentage given the high rate of failure among startups and new ventures, but it's clear the defining measure of this program won't be the original startups - it will be the eventual impact the students have on Canada and the world. The Next 36 will be able to say they helped them along their way by giving them an entreprenurial mindset.

It's certainly clear that is what's happening. It's like they say: first you fail, then you succeed.

MaRS connects the communities of science, business and capital and fosters collaboration among them.
This happens physically through location of research labs, companies of all sizes, business advisors, investors and professional services within the MaRS Centre and more broadly through hands-on advisory services, entrepreneurial programming, our structured networks and expanding electronic...
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The Next 36 addresses Canada's deficit of high impact entrepreneurship by providing resource-rich education programs to promising young entrepreneurs. It was founded by a small group of business leaders and academics and is championed by Founding Patrons W. Galen Weston, Paul Desmarais, Sr. and Jimmy Pattison. We believe that by fast-tracking the development of Canada’s most talented young...
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Dan Verhaeghe

Dan Verhaeghe focuses on marketing, mobile, major technology players, entertainment, and new media.
Dan has a dozen years of online experience that dates back to the turn of the millennium where he dominated a now non-existent online RPG game for a couple of years at the age of 15. He would eventually become a Toronto Blue Jays blogger who earned his way into Toronto's CP24 studios six years...
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